Policy Wise

Government’s decision to monitor pregnancies is a regressive step.

In a bid to check female infanticide and the worsening sex ratio, the Indian government has decided to make registration mandatory for all pregnancies. Further, abortions would now be allowed under certain circumstances.

On Thursday, Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury told Hindustan Times that she wanted each pregnancy to be registered. “This will help to check both foeticide and infant mortality,” she said.

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss had said on Wednesday, “We will provide facilities to conduct pregnancy tests in each village. It will help provide better healthcare facilities to mother and child.”

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Abortions in India are currently governed by the Medical termination of Pregnancy Act 1971. While the act only allows termination of pregnancies (upto 20 weeks) if it would cause ”grave injury to physical and mental health of the women”, it leaves a big loophole.

Where any pregnancy occurs as a result of failure of any device or method used by any married woman or her husband for the purpose of limiting the number of children, the anguish caused by such unwanted pregnancy may be resumed to constitute a grave injury to the mental health of the pregnant woman.

Since every contraceptive has a failure rate, and it is practically impossible to verify if contraceptive failure had actually occurred, abortion is virtually on demand in India.

The ease of abortion, while a significant step in gender equality has played its part in skewing the sex ratio in India. However,its effect has been vastly overestimated. The sex ratio in India has followed a largely secular trend; from 972 in 1901 to 946 in independent India’s first census in 1951. In fact, the sex ratio was already 927 in 1971 when the MTP act came in to force and has actually improved to 933 in 2001. While it must be acknowledged that India has been losing a lot of babies due to female infanticide, not all of it is due to easy availability of abortion.

This is hardly the first time the government is attempting to check female infanticide through legislative methods. The Pre-conception pre-natal diagnostic techniques (regulation and prevention of misuse) Act of 1994 banned pre-natal sex determination. However, the first conviction under this act was only handed out in 2006! In the meantime, the British medical journal Lancet has estimated that India lost as many as 5 million female babies! While a case could be made for better implementation of the law, I remain skeptical how much actual effect it would have.

And therein lies the real danger of such efforts. As experience in America has shown, banning abortion is not a long-term solution. People will obtain abortion if they want it sufficiently, and it only pushes women in the hands of quacks thus further damaging their health. Also, the right to abortion is intrinsically linked to right to privacy and is an acknowledgment that a woman enjoys primacy over her own body. While attempting to curb female infanticide, the government is actually damaging gender equality. it also ignores that merely ensuring the birth of the female child is not enough. Apart from post-natal killings which are rampant in certain parts of India, what sort of upbringing she would have in a family which was ready to abort her merely because of her sex. It is quite likely that such a family would show little interest in her education and thus perpetuate this cycle of deprivation. Also, As activists are already pointing out, it would be practically impossible to gather data and it would only empower the babus

There is little doubt that the skewed sex ratio in India represents a major challenge. In fact, according to the 2001 census, the sex ratio among 0-6 age group is even worse and falling rapidly. This indicates that the problem of female infanticide may actually be getting worse. What would be the way forward? Here again the census data is illustrative. Kerala which has a female literacy rate of 87.4% has the best sex ratio in India. Contrast this with Punjab, economically a much more developed state where the sex ratio is 876 or urban Delhi (821). The key to saving female babies is empowering mothers; ensuring education and economic independence for them. This is frequently dismissed as long term measure. That is not always true, districts in Punjab by launching a concerted campaign with involvement of the local people and medical professionals have shown a drastic improvement in as little as five years. Unless women are the primary decision makers when it comes to matters of their own body, there is little hope of improvement.